Shamrock School for Girls - New Tactics
by Sharkycast
Summary: A Short Story involving the students of an original school I created, set in the Girls und Panzer universe.


**Author's Note – An Introduction to the School and its Students**

_Shannon is a second year student at Shamrock School for Girls. She is a friendly, bubbly character with a reputation of being something of an airhead. This, however, is mixed with more admirable traits such as determination and perseverance. She isn't the brightest button and holds a belief that all problems can be overcome somehow, but she never really has a detailed plan as to how to achieve her ends. She is content to bumble into all sorts of situations, confident that her desired outcome will be reached in the end (probably)._

_Although a long-term fan of sensha-do, Shannon had never thought of actually participating in it. That was until she saw Miho Nishizumi win the 63__rd__ Nationals with a school that no one had ever heard of before. Shannon was immediately convinced that if Ooarai could do it then any school could._

_Shamrock School for Girls had never had their own sensha-do team before, but this did not deter Shannon. Fired up with single-minded enthusiasm, she founded the Shamrock School for Girls Sensha-do Team and installed herself as Captain. She pestered and badgered the school's museum until they eventually agreed to let the Sensha-do Team borrow and restore the Vickers Mk D tank that had been on display there. With a new club start-up grant she was able to buy two Landsverk L-60 light tanks that had been going cheap._

_Equipped with this mighty force, Shannon is convinced that Shamrock School for Girls Sensha-do Team is ready to take on the world. Bizarrely, this unfounded enthusiasm has infected most of her teammates too, who are usually confident of victory even though they have no reason to hold this belief. Their almost constant losses do not upset them in the slightest. They are convinced that it is all part of the learning curve that will one day culminate in their winning national or even international events._

_Shannon is a well-respected team Captain even though her experience of sensha-do is very limited. She does have some knowledge of the sport, gleaned from all her years as a keen spectator, and the team admire her talents and perseverance outside of matches too. She is certainly no genius, but is an accomplished seamstress. She managed to furnish the whole team with smart green uniforms, which she scrounged from all sources. Their dark green jackets she obtained from a disbanded brass band, then added the black collar and cuffs herself. The emerald green pleated skirts are actually from the Shamrock School PE kit. Shannon also used her sewing skills to personally make all the 'caubeen' style caps that her team proudly wear with a tall feather hackle behind their badges. _

_Shannon also likes collecting autographs of her favourite sensha-do personalities. She has them from most of St. Gloriana (they were too polite to say no), Erika Itsumi and Koume Akaboshi, but she would really like to get Katyusha and the Nishizumi sisters._

_Clare, like the team commander, is also a second year. She is a very different kind of person to Shannon. Clare is cool, calm, collected and rational. She sometimes wonders if the team wouldn't do better if she was in command instead of Shannon. She does, however, recognise that Shannon has enormous energy and passion for the team, as well as a better knowledge of Sensha-do than Clare does (although both of them are participating in the sport for the first time)._

_Clare agreed with Shannon's idea, based on St. Gloriana, that they would adopt nicknames for all team members and she chose Clare for herself after learning it was a common given name as well. All the nicknames are actually Irish rivers._

_Clare serves as Shannon's Vice-Commander. She is responsible for the majority of the organisation and also coming up with the strategies and tactics for any matches. Shannon thinks Clare should also be in charge of the pre-match reconnaissance and intelligence department of the Shamrock team, although currently neither of them have much of a clue about this side of things._

_Clare commands one of the teams L-60 light tanks. She is far more realistic than Shannon about the team's prospects in any matches, given that they only have three low quality tanks available to them. She feels they desperately need to get more tanks from somewhere; either through buying, borrowing or generous gifts! She is also the fittest member of the team and can regularly be found at the gym at some unearthly hour of the morning._

_Erne is a third year student. Like all of the team, this is her first time participating in Sensha-do, as there was no Shamrock School team before Shannon founded it. Erne is fiery and hot-headed with a quick temper but she is also carefree and fun-loving. She commands the second L-60 light tank. For reasons not fully clear, Erne has a deep resentment to students of St. Gloriana Girls' College, believing them all to be stuck-up, good-for-nothing posh girls._

_Annalee is Erne's younger sister. She is a first year and serves as the gunner in Erne's L-60. Annalee is also an accomplished musician and carries a battered fiddle around with her always. The team love her music and she can often be found sat on the turret of the L-60 playing a lively Irish jig or something similar to make tasks such as washing the tanks a bit more enjoyable. She is relatively shy but hopes that participating in Sensha-do will improve her musical talent._

_Laune is a somewhat clumsy and disaster-prone girl and is another first year member of the team; although she should be in her second year. She was held back one year as she is not exactly the brightest of students. Laune has a prosthetic right leg following a traffic accident when she was younger; her recovery time also contributed to her being held back a year before High School. Laune initially wanted to join the team as a tank driver, but she was persuaded that her talents for destruction could be better employed as a gunner. She is currently the gunner on Shannon's Vickers Mk D._

_As a general rule, the team is quite rowdy and undisciplined, although always super-friendly (almost to the point of being annoying) to other schools. It is not uncommon for their training sessions to end with a rough-and-tumble style brawl between the Shamrock girls, as all the girls let off steam and energy. These are never malicious in any way but can be a bit startling to other schools who weren't expecting to see such a spectacle!_

**Trivia**

_Shannon's real name is Iona Yoshimura*. Her birthday is 6th December, which is also the date of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, and the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Her favourite tank is the Vickers Mk D._

_Clare's birthday is 1st July, which is also the same date (in the old system calendar) of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, where William of Orange defeated James Stewart (formerly King James II). Her favourite tank is the A41 Centurion. Her real name is Kira Hanamori._

_Erne's name is Erina Daimon and her birthday is 24th April, which is the same date as the start of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. __Her favourite tank is the ARL 44._

_Annalee's birthday is 10th April, which is the same date as the Good Friday peace agreement was signed in 1998. __Her real name is Akina Daimon. Her favourite tank is the Panzer II because she thinks it looks cute._

_Laune's real given name is Ume Kamezawa. Her birthday is 24th May, which is the same date as the start of the United Irishmen's rebellion of 1798, and also the same date as the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. __Her favourite tank is the A7V, because she finds it easiest to draw._

[* Their names are given in a Westernised format, i.e. given name then family name.]

**New Tactics – A Short Story**

"**Shamrock School for Girls, Sensha-do Team Hanger, 10:00**

"OK ladies! OK! OK? Ladies? SHUT THE HELL UP AND PAY ATTENTION!" bellowed Shannon, the self-appointed captain of Shamrock School for Girls Sensha-do Team, which she had founded that year. Short, reasonably well-endowed and insanely chirpy, Shannon sometimes had to shout to keep her team under control.

At her outburst, the chattering girls settled down and looked forward from where they were sat in rows on three long benches in the hanger. Standing at the front was Team Captain Shannon next to a whiteboard which had various boxes and arrows drawn on it. Also standing at the front was the team's Vice-Commander, Clare. Clare was a tall slender girl with red-brown hair and hazel eyes who was usually very calm and collected, which helped to rein in some of Shannon's wilder ideas.

"So, today we're going to be learning tactics…" Shannon began. There were groans from the assembled tankers. "Before… BEFORE..!" Shannon shouted over the groans "…before we put them into practice using the tanks!" This statement was greeted with cheers.

"What we're going to be studying today is the Panzer… keil…" Shannon said, reading the name from the book she was holding. She pronounced the last part of the word as 'keel'.

"That sounds German," someone from the ranks piped up.

"It is!" Shannon said with enthusiasm. "We're going to study it as I have asked the very famous and prestigious Kuromorimine Girls' Acedemy…" There were 'oooh's and 'ahhh's from the girls at the mention of this institution "…for a joint practice session." More cheering. "Since they are a school who use predominantly German tanks, we want to be able to impress them with our knowledge of German tank tactics, don't we?" Shannon cajoled the group. There were general murmurs of agreement.

"Have you actually heard back from Kuromorimine?" Clare asked.

"No, not yet, but they are a very busy team so I'm sure these things take a while," Shannon answered breezily.

**Kuromorimine Girls Academy, Panzerkraft Team HQ, Kommandant's Office, one week previously.**

'PING!'

A new mail alert sounded on the computer of Vice-Kommandant Koume Akaboshi, who was sat at her desk in the office. She stopped reading the online magazine article that she had been engrossed in and opened the team inbox.

"It's from Shamrock. Again," she said to Kommandant Erika Itsumi.

Despite being at her desk in the main Panzerkraft Team office, Erika was currently struggling with some tricky maths homework and therefore in a worse mood than usual.

"Delete it," she said flatly, without looking up from her trigonometry problem.

"Okay!" Koume replied, clicking the dustbin icon next to the unread e-mail as she did so.

**Shamrock School for Girls, Sensha-do Team Hanger, 10:05**

"So… the Panzerkeel is an offensive formation used by… er… by tanks. It's wedge-shaped formation, with the most heavily armed and armoured vehicles nearest the enemy; typically Tiger Is with lighter tanks; such as Panzer IVs and Panzer IIIs further back," Shannon paraphrased the textbook she held in one hand.

"The advantage of the Panzer…thing… is that the enemy gunners have to constantly adjust their ranges, because of the depth of the formation. Also, the heavily armoured Tigers and Panthers bear the brunt of the anti-tank fire, leaving the more vulnerable tanks safe from enemy fire," Shannon concluded reading.

"So…" Shannon said again, passing the book to Clare and turning to the whiteboard. "You can see it's like a V-shape, with the heavy tanks here and the lighter tanks here." Shannon's whiteboard did indeed show a sideways V-shaped formation of tanks, with crude boxes labelled 'heavy tanks' drawn at the top and bottom on the left, with other boxes labelled 'light tanks' in the middle on the right.

Annalee, a short first year, raised her hand and spoke. "We only have three tanks," she pointed out.

"That's fine... we can make a V-shape with three tanks," Shannon said. She took a board rubber and wiped out four of the seven boxes she had drawn, leaving only three in a triangle.

"The book says the light tanks should be in the middle..." Clare said, studying the pages.

"That doesn't work. We've got two light tanks and one medium," called out Erne, a tall third year who was Annalee's sister.

"Well... we'll put the medium in the middle and the light tanks on the edge. There; that works!" Shannon said in response to this, rubbing out the annotations for the drawn boxes and re-writing them opposite to how they had been.

"The book says the heavier tanks should lead," Clare said, still pouring over the borrowed text book.

"Oh that's no problem. We can have our 'V' going the other way!" Shannon solved this difficulty simply and effectively, erasing the arrow that had been pointing to the left and replacing it with a new arrow pointing to the right.

"Isn't that... completely different to how the book describes the formation?" Clare asked her captain.

Shannon pondered this while looking at her altered diagram. "I guess so, but we have to make allowances. I'm sure Kuromorimine will understand!" she answered. There were nods of agreement and approval from her team; after all, Kuromorimine would understand it was difficult to replicate an entire blitzkrieg with only three tanks.

As the noises of consent died down, a girl with apricot-coloured hair who was nicknamed Laune slowly raised her hand. "So... we're driving the tanks backwards...?" she asked, peering at the modified drawing.

"Noooo!" Shannon howled, and patiently began to explain it, mostly for Laune's benefit, all over again.

**Shamrock School for Girls, Sensha-do Practice Grounds, 11:00**

With the tactics finally explained and mostly understood, the girls of Shamrock School for Girls Sensha-do team were putting them into practice. The two grey Landsverk L-60 tanks were trying their best to stay in arrowhead formation with the mighty and unstoppable force that was the team's pride and joy, the dark green Vickers Mk D which had come out of the school museum.

The problem, it seemed, was that while the formation they were supposed to be in looked easy when drawn on a whiteboard, it was a good deal harder to achieve on the battlefield. Differences in terrain, obstacles in their path, and the varying skill of the drivers meant that the light L-60s were often either too far behind or nearly level with the medium tank. Shannon did her best to co-ordinate the other two tanks; standing out of the commander's cupola of the Vickers with her twin tails of bright ginger hair streaming the wind.

After forty minutes of practice, the three tanks returned to the hangers to swap crews. Sadly for Shamrock School Sensha-do Team, they had more members than they had crew spaces for, so had to swap over half way through training sessions so that everyone got a go.

With the changeover complete, the intrepid tankers set off once again, this time with Clare in command of the precious Vickers Mk D and Shannon commanding one of the Landsverks. The second practice session was not an improvement on the first; in fact it was a good deal worse. The distances between the three tanks varied from anything from three to three hundred metres, and at one point they even ended up with both L-60s on the same side of the medium tank, although no one was quite sure how this happened.

**Shamrock School for Girls, Sensha-do Practice Grounds, 12:00**

Despite the difficulties of the training session, by the time the girls returned to the team's hangers they felt confident that they had got to grips with the basics of the idea and just needed some more practice to really refine it. They were in high spirits as the crews clambered out of the tanks and were joined by the rest of the team.

"OK! Good work today girls!" Shannon called out to them all. There were wild cheers.

"And let's have a big cheer for our joint training session with Kuromorimine soon!" Shannon yelled to the hyped up girls. "Hooray…hey!" she exclaimed as she felt her dark green 'caubeen' style cap being plucked off her head. She turned to find that Clare had seized her cap and was holding up in the air.

"Hey, give it back!" Shannon jumped and tried to grab it out of the hands of the taller girl, but was unable to reach.

"Come and get it, if you can… wah!" Clare yelled. The reason for her sudden exclamation was an unexpected sneak attack by Erne, who had darted in and lifted either side of Clare's short pleated skirt, exposing a pair of pearly-white lace panties.

"Oh you…!" Clare exclaimed, giving chase to Erne who was trying to flee after her skirt-lifting raid. Clare flung Shannon's cap away from her as she started to run and it was caught by Laune. Shannon pursued it to reclaim it and Laune tried to run away, but had unfortunately forgotten that running was no longer one of her strong points. She fell flat on her face and was promptly tripped over by the fleeing Erne.

"Haha!" Clare yelled in triumph, closing in for her revenge.

"I'll save you sis!" Annalee shouted with a laugh and swiftly rugby tackled Clare to the ground. Shannon, her cap forgotten, dived on top of the pair of them as Clare struggled to get free. More and more of the girls piled in or became engaged in rough-and-tumbles of their own making, until general anarchy ensued for the next ten minutes.

Once the chaos subsided the girls made their way over to the tank hanger, covered in mud, dust, and a few bruises that hadn't been there at the start of training. Most of them walked over with their three cherished tanks trundling alongside, moving to the sound of their team march _'Lilliburlero'_ which Annalee was playing on her fiddle as she sat atop the Vickers Mk D.

Back at the hanger they all set about washing the tanks; an arduous task made more bearable by Annalee's further musical accompaniment as she serenaded them with _'The White Cockade'_ while the others hosed and scrubbed the mud off the tanks (and sometimes each other).

Practice over, it was common for the now tired girls to relax in the bath house to get clean and refreshed. Their dark green tank jackets and emerald green PE skirts were packed in their kit bags ready to be laundered in time for the next training session, or maybe even a match when the various schools they had contacted responded to them.

A few of the team had homework to do or other pressing engagements and so left immediately after they had changed back into their school uniforms. The rest, however, headed off to 'The Old Golden Harp', more commonly known simply as 'The Harp', which was the name of the student social building. It had various cafés and bars on the ground floor with school club offices on the floor above. One of these was the HQ for the Sensha-do team, with an additional room about the size of a broom cupboard which Shannon called her office.

The team swaggered into The Harp, confident in the knowledge that they were the best Sensha-do team the school had ever had. With just a bit more effort and practice, especially once they had trained with Kuromorimine, they were certain that the likes of Saunders and Pravda would crumble before them. The next National Tournament would be an excellent place to prove themselves; after that, maybe they would try their luck in the international competitions…?


End file.
